emerged as the most recognizable, outspoken and controversial cheerleader for regenerative medicine. In 2003, he co-founded the Mprize to encourage research into boosting longevity in mice. In 2006, Technology Review offered $20,000 to anyone who could disprove de Grey’s anti-aging proposals (no one won). In 2009, the computer scientist-turned-biologist co-founded the SENS Organization to help fund labs targeting the seven age-related problems identified by de Grey.

And this past April, de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation launched a new prize for — get ready — growing and transplanting a viable human organ. To catch up with de Grey, Wired.com crossed the pond to London and joined him for “lunch” (two pints each of London Ale). During a long chat at a pub a few blocks from his mother’s house in Chelsea, de Grey explained the differences between scientists and technologists, why Sergey Brin won’t give him any money, and how a steady diet of beer guides his thinking.

Wired.com: What’s more frustrating: Answering questions about SENS (“Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence“) or questions about your beard?

Aubrey de Grey: To be honest, neither are particularly frustrating. So long as I can actually get through to people, I don’t care how I do it. Most scientists will get serious media exposure about twice in their entire career. And they’ll get that because they’ve actually done an experiment that was interesting.

Well, I don’t even do experiments, right? [laughs] And I’m in the media all the bloody time. I’ve been out there represented as an immortality merchant since forever. These days, I can afford to not just acquiesce and let journalists use phrases like “immortality,” or at least not in the title of the bloody ass thing.

Wired.com: It’s been a decade since you established the principles behind SENS. What’s been the most striking piece of data to support your hypotheses?

de Grey: That’s an incredibly difficult question because the nature of the whole SENS approach is divide and conquer. There are so many different technologies being brought together, so picking one across the whole board would be almost farcical.

However, I want to pick up on one particular word you used, which was to call the whole thing a hypothesis. I don’t really like to call my proposal a hypothesis, because you don’t call technological proposals hypotheses; you call scientific proposals hypotheses.

I’ve always found that basic scientists who are interested in testing hypotheses think very differently from technologists who are interested in, you know, changing the world in some way. A large part of the difficulties I’ve had in getting my colleagues in gerontology to really understand what I’m saying is that they’re all scientists and not really technologists. In this case what I’m saying is if we implement SENS properly, comprehensively, then it will actually postpone age-related ill health substantially. And we certainly don’t have any data plus or minus on that because, of course, we haven’t implemented it yet, right?

Wired.com: True.

de Grey: However, to come back to your question [laughs], there’s been masses. In fact, the single best metric, the single best piece of evidence giving an impression of how fast things are moving and have been moving, is what happened with my book: The hardback came out in 2007. When they published a paperback edition a year later, we were given the chance to update the text. They didn’t want us to do too much because, you know, it’s work. But it was impossible not to do too much. So we ended up simply writing an entire new chapter, an afterword. That was how much there was. It took a whole regular-sized chapter just to cover one year of development across all of the various SENS components.

Wired.com: I’m glad you brought up the differences between scientists and technologists. At age 30, you switched fields from artificial intelligence to biology. It’s been said people who switch fields at relatively late stages in their careers tend to do particularly inventive work. Why is that, and what from your previous scholarship did you bring to gerontology?

de Grey: First of all, research is a very transferable skill. If you’ve learned how to work on really hard problems, you can apply that to a different domain very easily. But the biggest handicap in research is an ability to think outside the box. The handicap is being encumbered by all the conventional wisdom in a given field.

I came in having made — albeit unpublished but nevertheless very significant — inroads in software verification. So I had a suitably high opinion of my own abilities to research. Second, I was aware of this general trend in science of new people coming in, so I felt confident I had a good chance of making a contribution. Third, from the beginning my goal was not to become an experimentalist with a lab, but a generalist surveying the literature and coming up with syntheses from disparate areas.

Through my wife, who taught me biology, I was very much aware that “theoreticians” or generalists are almost non-existent in biology. Unlike physics, where you’ve got whole departments of theoreticians trying to bring ideas together from disparate areas, and pacing up and down and talking to themselves and not doing experiments … in biology, that’s virtually unknown.

And to the extent it is known, it’s given very little respect, because it’s awfully easy to do incredibly bad theoretical biology just by going out and identifying some interesting problem and reading maybe 10 percent of the relevant literature and coming out with some gloriously economical hypothesis and rushing into print without actually bothering to read the other 90 percent. This happens a hell of a lot.

But the thing is, a small coterie of theoreticians in biology who do take care have a rather high hit rate. If you look at winners of the Nobel Prize in biology, you’ll find a fair smattering of people who don’t know how to work a pipette.

Wired.com: The results from research into mouse longevity won’t necessarily be directly applicable to human biology. Nevertheless, you’ve made it clear such work is vital for getting someone like Oprah to help champion the anti-aging cause. When do you foresee yourself getting that kind of exposure?

de Grey: Someone like Oprah is not really too keen to get too close in bed with people who don’t have mainstream credentials and authority. But it’s really changing fast. A month or two ago, one of my colleagues, Tony Atala, who runs an enormous group working in tissue engineering at Wake Forest, was on Oprah. He’s on my research advisory board and is associated with my journal and so on. Even though his work is not mainly focused on aging, the show was basically about aging. He was very, very gung-ho about the potential for regenerative medicine to postpone aging in the relatively foreseeable future.

Wired.com: And mice are the key.

de Grey: I do think it’s going to start with mice. What’s going to happen is the curmudgeons — the card-carrying gerontologists who think it’s very dangerous to be over-optimistic — will eventually recognize the data available to us from mice is so solid we can go out publicly and say, “It’s only a matter of time.” That’s going to take a panel of interventions in mice that’s so comprehensive we actually add two whole years to the lifespan of mice that are already in middle age before we start.

That may be overcautious. We may be able to get gerontologists on board with a more modest result than that. However, at that point, game over. My job will be done. I can retire. Because that will be the point when Oprah will be all over it and the following day it will become impossible to get elected unless you have a manifesto commitment to have a war on aging.

And there will be abundant people who are better than me at all the things I have to do at the moment, and I will no longer be necessary. And I shall fade away into glorious obscurity and you won’t be able to find me, even if you offer me a beer.

Wired.com: Well, you’ll be in a pub probably.

de Grey: Yes, but I won’t be in a pub with a journalist. [laughs]

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Authors: Steven Leckart

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